Spear phishing is one of the top threats plaguing enterprises today, often resulting in severe financial losses and theft of intellectual property. In high-profile cases, it can damage a company’s reputation and brands, resulting in executive firings and decreases in stock prices.

Organizations seeking to protect themselves from these threats need to develop a full-spectrum defense to effectively combat these highly targeted attacks.
A comprehensive approach couples employee education and testing with technology solutions tailored to detecting the specific characteristics of spear phishing.

To users, spear phishing emails may seem like legitimate requests for information or other forms of benign contact, potentially appearing to even come from a person or company a user is friendly or familiar with. But for attackers, spear phishing emails are most often the best way to get the keys to the kingdom.

In 13 years of protecting hundreds of millions of end users from email-based attacks, Cloudmark has seen billions of malicious emails, giving the company an inside view of the threats that come from messaging environments. We’ve seen the rise of phishing emails and their effects. And more recently, in the past several years, we’ve observed the tremendous growth and success of spear phishing attacks which have had devastating consequences for businesses and governments.